Group items tagged

insufficient investment in research and development

they would help inoculate European economies against the adverse effects of energy disruptions in the medium term.

Consideration should be given to invoking GATT Article XXI, which provides exceptions for national security reasons from rights and obligations under the World Trade Organization (WTO), for example. Invoking this WTO exception would allow across-the-board actions against Russia without prior notification or even justification. The national security exception of Article XXI is that broad. In brief, the United States and the European Union could remove in one step all the WTO benefits they accorded Russia when it acceded to the WTO in August 2012. Doing so would disrupt bilateral trade and investment, possibly kicking tariffs back up to Smoot-Hawley levels of the 1930s.

Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents.

Ad sales agents and pilots are two jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects will decline in number over the next decade. Flying a plane is largely automated today and will become more so.

Telemarketers are among those most at risk

More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s.

“The answer is surely not to try to stop technical change,” Mr. Summers said, “but the answer is not to just suppose that everything’s going to be O.K. because the magic of the market will assure that’s true.”

In the areas that are sound, it is mainly that TPP members will probably have to approach the US norms faster than desirable, and possibly faster than they can effectively administer. But there are also areas in which the TPP is not in the interests of most non-US members.

However, it is generally accepted that TTIP is more important to Europe than to the US, which greatly strengthens the US’s hand in negotiations.

it is widely accepted that the deeper intra-European integration fostered by the Single Market initiative was a major contributor to European prosperity between 1992 and 2007

he US has strongly promoted Investor-State Dispute Arbitration in which foreign-owned private firms can seek settlements against governments for taking actions that are not prohibited by the agreements but which reduce the value of investments that the firms have made in member countries.

For states that do not have a lot of, say, social or environmental legislation at the time TPP is signed, Investor-State Arbitration threatens to make progress in these dimensions difficult.

This reads very much like an agreement to cooperate to make sure that outcomes in the trading system are as the US and EU want them – and with around half of world GDP between them and a further 15% in the rest of TPP, it suggests that the choice facing other will be capitulation vs. exclusion. I fear the latter.

Champions of the multilateral system must be much more explicit about its virtues and value – and among these I include Europe (middle-sized countries with a strong belief in negotiated outcomes and order) and China (which has been a massive beneficiary of open markets and non-discrimination to date).

urope had better get on with an internally driven liberalisation, especially of services and utilities markets, to stimulate the recovery quite independent of the outside pressures of a trade negotiation;

Airbus has struggled to sell the planes. Orders have been slow, and not a single buyer has been found in the United States, South America, Africa or India.

While the A380 program has been a boon for the European aerospace industry, Airbus is unlikely to recover its research and development costs. The best it can now expect is to break even on production costs, according to analysts, provided that it can keep orders going.

Airbus made the wrong prediction about travel preferences. People would rather take direct flights on smaller airplanes, he said, than get on big airplanes — no matter their feats of engineering — that make connections through huge hubs.

“It’s a commercial disaster,” Mr. Aboulafia says. “Every conceivably bad idea that anyone’s ever had about the aviation industry is embodied in this airplane.”

Airline executives were wary of expanding their fleets aggressively, especially for a costly, four-engine fuel hog.

A little more than a decade ago, the two dominant airplane makers, Boeing and Airbus, looked at where their businesses were headed and saw similar facts: air traffic doubling every 15 years, estimates that the number of travelers would hit four billion by 2030 — and came to radically different conclusions about what those numbers meant for their future.

“The A380 is not made for every route, but it is ideal for high-traffic routes, high-volume routes that are congested, or where there are flying constraints,”

And there are a fair number of those routes. Around 15 of the 20 largest long-haul routes by passenger volume in the world today are slot-constrained,

Boeing, too, is facing lukewarm demand for its latest jumbo jet upgrade, known as the 747-8. The company has received just 51 orders for this big plane, which can seat about 460 passengers and lists at $357 million. By contrast, it has sold more than 1,200 twin-engine 777s, which sell for as much as $320 million.

Richard H. Anderson, Delta’s chief executive, has said the A380 is “by definition an uneconomic airplane unless you’re a state-owned enterprise with subsidies.”

Bruno Delile, Air France’s senior vice president for fleet management, says that there are a limited number of routes in its network with enough daily traffic to justify the expense of such a big plane. “The forecasts about traffic growth and market saturation haven’t exactly panned out,” he says.

Not only do airlines take a big risk on the size and cost of the A380, but they also have to gain the cooperation of airports to modify gates and widen taxiways to make room for the plane.

With versions that seat 210 to 330 passengers, and with a range of about 9,000 miles, the 787 allows airlines to fly pretty much anywhere in the world and connect smaller airports without going through a hub.

And passengers are willing to pay more to avoid a connection

f most airlines appear skeptical of the A380, Emirates is a true believer. It stunned the industry in December when it ordered 50 more of the planes, beyond the 90 it already had on order, throwing Airbus a much needed lifeline

The airport handled 66 million passengers last year, rivaling Heathrow as the busiest international hub.

for Emirates, the biggest selling point of the A380 is its ability to pack in more business-class seats and create an environment that appeals to big-spending passengers.

To do so, CO2 emissions from industry and energy use would have to fall to at most 1.6 tons a year for every person on the planet by midcentury.

That is less than a tenth of annual American emissions per person today and less than a third of the world average

Lacking any understanding of the feasibility of the exercise, governments postured and jockeyed over which country should be responsible for what

This is not achievable by going after low-hanging fruit, such as replacing coal with natural gas in power plants.

The decarbonization paths rely on aggressive assumptions about our ability to deploy new technologies on a commercial scale economically.

Russia, for instance, hit the target. But Oleg Lugovoy of the Environmental Defense Fund, who worked on the Russian plan, observed that “if we don’t have carbon capture and storage we would have to reconsider.”